There are two opposed views on the proper relationship between academic research and political activism. The first argues that academics who study politics must remain objective, hence precluding activism. The second argues that academics can and should also be political activists, hence precluding scholarly objectivity. This article argues against an assumption shared by these otherwise opposing positions: that activism and objectivity are incompatible. It conceptually identifies and then normatively defends a form of objectivity characterized by active engagement with evidence that is what Max Weber calls “inconvenient” for one’s existing beliefs and commitments. Far from being incompatible with political activism, this form of objectivity is essential to its success. Since scholars, activists, and scholar-activists alike would all benefit from active engagement with inconvenient evidence, I conclude that academic institutions should promote this form of objectivity among both activist and non-activist scholars, while political organizations should promote the same virtue among both academic and non-academic activists.

Structural realists accuse U.S. economic engagement with China as a mistake driven by liberal idealism and lack of realism. I suggest that this increasingly popular narrative reflecting the traditional idealism-realism distinction is misplaced. First, liberal approaches to international relations can clash with each other when a democratic state engages with an authoritarian state, and engagement is justified by one strand of liberalism—economic interdependence liberalism—whereas a different liberal perspective—democratic peace liberalism—opposes economic engagement with an oppressive regime. Second, realism—in particular, structural realism—posits that important state behaviors reflect the need to attain more relative power than others. Then, if economic engagement better serves a state’s relative capacity vis-à-vis other states, economic exchanges with a potential strategic contender would be an unavoidable choice. The liberal case for economic engagement is much more restrictive than it is often articulated, while a structural realist case for engagement can be convincingly made. For about two decades since the mid-1990s, U.S. administrations defended economic engagement with China not only with economic interdependence liberalism but also by utilizing an argument in line with the structural realist case for engagement. Blaming one foreign policy idea as responsible for today’s strategic difficulties is misleading.

Despite the common assumption that ethnography is most successful where researchers achieve recognition as insiders within the communities they study, conducting research in nondemocracies inverts incentives to conduct ethnographic research as an insider and poses unexpected ethical risks to both researchers and respondents. Rather than increasing trust and facilitating access, cultivating insider roles in nondemocracies may have the unintended effects of encouraging conformity with regime discourses, limiting further fieldwork access, and exacerbating respondents’ tendency toward epistemic deference. Drawing on the authors’ research experiences and the growing literature on fieldwork in nondemocracies, this article argues that outsider roles may be preferable to insider roles for identifying the unspoken rules, assumptions, and taken-for-granted aspects of everyday politics in nondemocracies. Moreover, outsider roles clarify the relationship between researcher and respondent in ways that provide clear ethical advantages in terms of consent, value, and risk.

Scholars have expressed concern over waning support for democracy worldwide. But what do ordinary citizens mean by the term “democracy," and how do their definitions of democracy influence their support for it? Using global cross-national survey data, this study demonstrates that individual variation in the understanding of democracy is substantively linked to democratic support across countries and regime contexts. Individuals who define democracy in terms of elections and the protection of civil liberties and those with greater conceptual complexity express higher support for democracy. This relationship between democratic conceptualization and support holds across diverse political contexts and alternative explanations. These results suggest that it is essential to consider divergent conceptualizations of democracy—and how they may vary systematically—when analyzing popular opinions of democracy.

This article examines how Indian anticolonialists drew on Darwinism and evolutionary theory to resist British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from The Bengalee (and beyond), I show how Indian nationalists marshaled evolutionist schemas to contest stage-based accounts of social advancement rationalizing despotic rule in India. I argue that Darwinian evolutionism enabled anticolonialists to respond to a particular decolonial dilemma—that of developmentalism, the unilinear notion of historical time justifying India’s political subjection. While Darwinism’s social application is commonly understood to sustain imperialism, I demonstrate that it served, in the colonial context, to deconstruct historicist tropes portraying India as politically immature. Drawing on evolutionism, nationalists contested the presumptions of imperialist discourse and reconceptualized progress in novel, anticolonial terms. Darwin’s travel to India thus exposes a distinctive decolonial quandary, the syncretic Indian anticolonial response to it, and the intractability of the contradictions facing decolonizing movements globally.

Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats. In this paper, I show detailed evidence for this decades-in-the-making trend and argue that it has important consequences for the U.S. politics of economic inequality and redistribution. Beginning in the 1990s, the Democratic Party started winning increasing shares of rich, upper-middle income, high-income occupation, and stock-owning voters. This appears true across voters of all races and ethnicities, is concentrated among (but not exclusive to) college-educated voters, and is only true among voters living in larger metropolitan areas. In the 2010s, Democratic candidates’ electoral appeal among affluent voters reached above-majority levels. I echo other scholars in maintaining that this trend is partially driven by the increasingly “culturally liberal” views of educated voters and party elite polarization on those issues, but I additionally argue that the evolution and stasis of the parties’ respective economic policy agendas has also been a necessary condition for the changing behavior of affluent voters. This reversal of an American politics truism means that the Democratic Party’s attempts to cohere around an economically redistributive policy agenda in an era of rising inequality face real barriers.

We know much about “how democracies die”: elites and masses become polarized, and norms of mutual toleration, forbearance, and institutional restraint erode. But why do elites feel free to undermine these guardrails of democracy? What are the sources of backsliding? Answers to these questions have focused on the impact of economic and cultural change, and on autocratic meddling. I consider another potential source of backsliding around the world: the impact of the reconfiguration of global politics after the Cold War and 9/11 on politics in the main prodemocratic actors that Samuel Huntington highlighted in his book The Third Wave: the United States, the European Union, and the Vatican. Today, the international context gives leaders in these global powers relatively weaker incentives to stand up for democracy, even in the face of aggressive meddling from Russia and China. Changes in international politics has left democracy with weaker ideational support in the global arena, potentially facilitating backsliding.

How do White Americans operationalize Whiteness? This article argues that religion, in conjunction with country of origin, alters how self-identified White Americans assign ethnoracial labels to other groups. To test the role of religion in White assignment, this article uses the case of Muslims and of Americans from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Although MENA individuals are legally classified as White in the United States, they are subjected to racialization and often conflated with Muslims. Using an historical analysis of racial prerequisite court cases and a survey experiment, I find that country of origin and religion play separate, additive roles in racial assignment decisions, both historically and today. These findings also extend to perceived skin tone. This is important because many of the benefits that come from being White depend on whether others perceive an individual as White. Understanding the constitutive parts of Whiteness compels research to be specific when discussing White people and why some “White” people are excluded.

Informality is often studied by scholars of urban studies but has received comparatively little attention by political scientists. This is surprising given the fact that large portions of the world’s population live, work, or transfer funds informally. The conventional wisdom is that the informal economy—the portion of the economy operating outside the regulatory reach of the state—is not very political because informal sector workers are relatively atomized and find collective action to be costly. The three books reviewed here, however, demonstrate that the informal sector is not only characterized by important forms of political organization but also affects politics within government institutions—and can even contribute to regime downfall. Calla Hummel’s Why Informal Workers Organize and Shelby Grossman’s Politics of Order in Informal Markets examine organization among informal sector workers, with Hummel probing the circumstances under which organization occurs and Grossman when such organizations are effective. In Black Markets and Militants, Medani takes the opposite perspective, examining how informal financial flows and networks affect state regulatory capacity. These three books marshal significant amounts of original data, pointing to how future research on these important dynamics can be conducted.

Three recent books introduce political scientists to important debates and conceptual challenges for contemporary social science research. Rather than proposing new methods, these books propose new frameworks that their authors believe should guide current practice. The authors and editors seek to guide researchers through the research process, from asking questions and proposing theories to operationalizing concepts and executing comparative research designs. Reading the three books together will give researchers a comprehensive overview of the state of the discipline on important questions like how and what to compare, what social science concepts should refer to, and how to proceed when theory and empirics disagree.

There is no doubt that the political economy of contemporary China has received significant attention, both in academic disciplines and in the real world. The role of the state in the economy and the relations between government and business actors have always been central concerns of classic social science works about China. There are, however, several crucial challenges in studying this topic. The complicated landscape of a multilayered, fragmented Chinese state and numerous state-owned, private, foreign, or mixed-type businesses has made it difficult to tease out their interactions and establish a comprehensive theoretical model. The fast-changing nature of state–market relations and their vast subnational and sectoral variation has often prevented scholars from generalizing those lessons beyond the case or issue area. Yet, among all these, the most daunting challenge is: How can studies of a particularly interesting phenomenon in China’s political economy contribute to broader discussions of state–society relations, regime durability, and state-led development without losing respectable country expertise?

How does the social nature of focus groups shape what researchers learn about preferences? This article delineates three preference types—private, publicly expressed, and group preferences—and introduces a new method for measuring each in a focus group setting. Original data on people’s preferences for punishing rape, wife beating, and theft across 80 focus groups in 20 villages in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo reveal clear differences across preference types, featuring more extreme punishment preferences in the public sphere. A within-subject experiment also shows that focus group discussions affect people’s private preferences by making them more extreme, which has ethical implications for researchers who use focus groups worldwide. The social nature of preferences observed in Democratic Republic of Congo underscores that scholars must adopt clear and transparent approaches to data comparison to learn about sensitive issues in the face of contested norms.

How do European far-right parties reconcile their long-standing nationalism with their allegiance to European “civilization”? Although they are certainly not contradictory, simultaneously adopting national and supranational identities requires considerable discursive maneuvering to articulate clearly. In this article, I argue that the European Far Right negotiates the boundaries between its national and supranational identities through two discursive mechanisms, abstraction and embedding, which present civilizationism as nonthreatening to and partially constituted by nationalism. Specifically, abstraction links European civilization to general features of a shared heritage, whereas embedding connects civilization to elements of the nationalist repertoire. I demonstrate the Far Right’s monopolization of civilizational discourse and use of these twin mechanisms through quantitative and qualitative analyses of more than 1,000 party manifestos and more than 650,000 tweets. These findings contribute to the growing scholarly literature that treats civilizations as supranational “imagined communities” and has implications for the study of nationalism, civilizationism, and the Far Right.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the unpredictability and instability of fieldwork as a method for data collection. As the pandemic prompted unprecedented political dynamism and social and economic disruptions at both domestic and global levels, in-person fieldwork became challenging, if even possible, in the two years following March 2020. While scholars are again using traditional fieldwork methods, we have seen an increased use of digital tools to conduct research remotely since the pandemic due to international travel bans and social distancing measures. Although not yet widely discussed, these new approaches pose new ethical questions as understandings of both our “fields” and “homes” evolve. In this paper, we stress the need for scholars to reconsider how we conceive of our ethical obligations in situations wherein we have conducted research without ever physically accessing our field sites or interacting in person with our participants. We particularly urge researchers to re-evaluate their ethical responsibilities around transparency and replicability in the dissemination and publication of findings when engaging in fieldwork “from home.” These considerations were necessary prior to 2020 but are especially relevant within the context of the pandemic as scholars enter new field sites remotely or return to those previously visited in person. As a result, this paper starts a critical conversation about ethical practices in remote and digital fieldwork, which will continue to prove significant as digital and remote methods are used for data collection in a post-pandemic world.

This article theorizes the politics of responsibility—activist struggles over who will be held accountable for structural injustices like the “catastrophic” changes underway in our climate. To do so, it develops a politicized conception of responsibility, one that treats responsibility as a social construct and a terrain of contestation. Building on the work of feminist philosophers of responsibility and on the praxis of “kayaktivism,” this politicized account treats responsibility as a social practice of interrogating and contesting shared ethico-political judgments. On this understanding, taking responsibility or stepping up is a way of making responsibility—literally of (re)constructing those social practices and judgments through conscious efforts to persuade others, challenge prevailing norms and interpretations, change people’s beliefs about how the world works, revise popular expectations of social actors and institutions, and disrupt business as usual. The article highlights the centrality of norms and power to social practices of responsibility and suggests alternative perspectives on familiar philosophical worries about blame, complexity and agency, and justification.

Political parties have long been theorized as a key political institution that links society with the formal political system, and thus have often featured prominently in theories of political economy and redistribution. Curiously, however, until recently party systems have received substantially less attention in theories seeking to explain redistribution among both democratic and non-democratic regimes. I build on this nascent literature by conceptualizing the relationship between party systems, inequality, and redistribution, advancing the argument that at least a portion of inequality and income redistribution in any given country is attributable to dynamics within its party system—particularly their structure and institutionalization. Hegemonic party systems can initiate large waves of social reform and redistribution in their formative years but their redistributive prospects significantly wane the longer a hegemonic party remains in power, while two-party systems are unlikely to provide much, if any, alleviation of inequality. Multi-party systems provide the greatest potential to redistribute, but the relationship is conditional on their relative institutionalization. Stable multi-party systems with institutionalized parties are more likely to exhibit both lower levels of inequality and redistribute more income, whereas inchoate counterparts are unlikely to be more redistributive than either hegemonic or two-party systems.

The American Political Science Association recently cautioned against the use of misinformation (giving research participants false information about the state of the world) in research with human subjects. This recommendation signals a growing recognition, as experimental research itself grows in prevalence in political science, that deceptive practices pose ethical problems. But what is wrong with misinformation in particular? I argue that while this question certainly has an ethical dimension, misinformation is bad for inference too. Misinformation moves us away from answering questions about the political world effectively. I propose a straightforward, intuitive solution to this twofold problem: tell the truth.

Most global population growth over the next two decades is projected to occur in small- and medium-sized cities in low- and middle-income countries. Expectations derived from the literature on fiscal federalism suggest that this is a cause for concern, as larger cities are thought to deliver public goods more effectively than smaller ones owing to economics of scale. Drawing on detailed cross-sectional data from Brazil and Indonesia, we show that smaller municipalities tend to possess more basic public health clinics and schools per capita, scattered throughout their territory, than larger cities. We theorize that the greater prevalence of such facilities in small cities reflects a relative lack of non-state alternatives, fewer concerns regarding “urban” problems faced in larger cities, and politicians’ greater ability to secure and claim credit for such facilities. We illustrate the logic of this argument in case studies of otherwise-similar cities of different sizes in Brazil, and with shadow cases from Indonesia. Our analysis underscores how jurisdiction size and non-state service provision can affect government services.

Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the theory that norms are transmitted through social learning, we show that these developments have spurred a dramatic realignment in public tolerance of offensive expression about race, gender, and religious groups. Tolerance of such speech has declined overall, and its traditional relationships with ideology, education, and age have diminished or reversed. Speech subject to changing norms of tolerance ranges from polemic to scientific inquiry, the fringes to the mainstream of political discourse, and left to right, raising profound questions about the scope of permissible debate in contemporary American politics.

What are the determinants of ethnic violence? Existing research has forwarded a range of often competing explanations, from political opportunism to economic competition to state incapacity. We argue that this diversity of accounts is attributable, in part, to scholars’ tendency to lump together distinct forms of ethnic violence that have different underlying determinants. We propose that scholars instead disaggregate ethnic violence and put forward a typology based on the target of the attack (properties vs. individuals) and whether assailants use arms. We demonstrate the utility of this typology by applying it to an original dataset of ethnic attacks against Christians in Egypt from 2013 to 2018. In addition to a set of shared factors, we find that unarmed attacks against property (“burnings”) are the product of political mobilization, unarmed attacks against individuals (“beatings”) are related to socioeconomic tensions, and armed attacks (“bombings”) follow the strategic logic of terrorist violence.